I just came back from Amsterdam, where Peter-Paul, Tom and I went to a notary to formally set up the association Fronteers. Fronteers, formerly known as the Guild of Front-Enders, is the Dutch association for front-end web developers (the guys and girls that know HTML, CSS and JavaScript).

After the (quite quick) visit to the notary, we went to a nearby café to celebrate the set up and also have our first meeting. We discussed some topics, nothing really new but more to have a clear view on what’s going on. We also hope to have the website ready soon, Krijn is working on that.

For all Dutch front-end developers that have been in a winters’ sleep for the past half year, as well as for the foreign visitors, a short introduction into Fronteers. It started April this year when Peter-Paul had the idea to bring the job as front-end developer to a higher level. The job itself isn’t respected within may web development companies, programmers and designers often do ‘the HTML‘. Also, the Dutch web accessibility guidelines are there for a time now, but the government and large companies don’t know which company can help them to build a web site compliant to those guidelines.

After the first two meeting we had over fifty interested front-enders, and that number grew once we made the idea public. Pretty quick there were plans for a conference (which took place exactly three weeks ago), and also life was put into some committees for education, certification and Flash (and some more).

So that was a brief introduction into Fronteers. Next is the announcement of the web site, where new members can sign up. We guess the number of members now is about 70 people, pretty much for an idea that started just a half a year ago. If you’re interested, stay updated via our mailinglist. I see Tom wrote a nice article as well about today, at the info.nl blog.

Cheers to Fronteers :)